Melinda Gates Would Give All the Money in the World to Empower Women

ELLE Editor-in-Chief Robbie Myers talks to the dedicated philanthropist about her mission to improve the lives of women everywhere.

Feb 1, 2015

BEN BAKER/REDUX

Melinda Gates takes her passion for data and for doing good to women and girls in the developing world. She talks to ELLE Editor-in-Chief Robbie Myers about breaking the cycle of poverty and rallying men for the cause.

Ask any seven-year-old this question and she'll have an answer at the ready, having worked and reworked her list since the moment she first became aware that nickels, quarters, and dollars enable their holder to acquire a whole range of things not available to someone with just a Barbie doll or a pillowcase full of Halloween candy to trade.

The answer is bandied about in games with friends and alone, pondering cloud formations on a lazy day in the backyard. It's edited and re-edited as the years pass, as ideas about what's valuable and important and beautiful evolve and are shaped by real life. It's an answer that in some simple way defines who we are: What would you do if you had all the money in the world?

Melinda Gates doesn't have all the money in the world, but she has a lot of it. She and her husband, Bill (we know you know, but let's say it for the record: the multibillionaire computer genius who founded Microsoft in 1975 and then 15 years ago, along with his wife, launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which currently has $42.3 billion in assets and has given away $31.6 billion in grants), are said by many to be the richest people in the world, with an estimated net worth of $82 billion. The phrase "in the world" seems almost permanently attached to Melinda these days—Google "most powerful women in the world," as my 14-year-old daughter did, and up she pops at number three.

Melinda is someone used to making top 10 lists, having graduated at the top of her high school class in 1982—an accomplishment she worked for "only because I wanted to go to a really good college," she told one audience, as if to reinforce the notion that it's not the top spot that matters but what you do with it. And now, of course, she is the woman who has probably the most well endowed charity in the world, which was founded with the clear yet deceptively complex mission of "unlocking the possibility inside every individual." What, Melinda, would you do with your money? Give it away, and try to save the world.

Still, when she turned 50 last year, she announced a slight alteration to that mission: to work on women's and girls' empowerment "for the rest of my life."

The life she has now seems pretty great: Her three children, Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe, are happy, enthusiastic participants in building their own meaningful lives, she says. And Melinda and her husband—who met in 1987 while she was working at Microsoft—have forged an even deeper bond over the years as their shared mission and drive has taken them to some of the most beautiful yet desperate places on earth, as well as given them specific knowledge and insight about what real change in developing nations requires.

We met on a chilly evening on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower, overlooking one of the world's most developed and vibrant cities. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, we could see the lights of the just opened 1 World Trade Center, lights that have come to represent both huge sorrow and the huge human capacity for rebirth and change. A fitting setting, to be sure.

RM: When you said on your 50th birthday that you planned to focus on women and girls for the rest of your life, that was pretty powerful. Was there a precipitating event?

MG: No, it's more all the travels I've done now for over a decade. You see this unbelievable need in the world and the unbelievable ingenuity of women, the great lengths they're going to…. When I did this London Family Planning Summit, someone said to me, 'Do you realize no one has ever raised this much money on a specific women's issue?' We raise money for children, for cancer, but a specific women's issue…. I think sometimes it takes a woman to point out the inequalities or just go, 'Huh, why haven't we done it? Right, guys? You didn't think about it.' So that's part of how I got there.

RM: I want to talk a bit about resistance. My daughter and I talk about the news a lot. So, there's ISIS and there's local news, and she asked me, 'Mommy, why is it that men are so violent?' and often toward women. In 2013, you told The New York Times that in the developing world women 'cannot use condoms,' referring to how hard it is in many cultures for women to demand much of anything from men. But you were able to get prostitutes to make their customers use condoms [in India]. What kind of learning can we take from that? Just for even my daughter to be able to say, 'No' or 'I want this to happen.'

MG: Cultural change comes in different ways for women. It was the prostitutes themselves who said, 'We're going to demand that our clients use condoms because we don't want to get STDs or HIV/AIDS.' When they came together, eventually the men had to go along.

RM: In the U.S., organizations like EMILY's List don't necessarily advocate for one side or the other; they just want women [in office]. I'm curious why the foundation doesn't get involved in political races and support candidates?

MG: No matter who is in Congress or who the president is, we're going to work with them, Republican or Democratic. So if we support a particular candidate, it just gets tricky.

RM: You've said that family planning is your life's work—can you explain why?

MG: If a woman can have voluntary access to contraceptives, she can time the births of her children, which starts her family on this virtuous cycle where she and her husband can feed the kids and hopefully bring in enough money to keep them in school. So contraceptives are an entrée, but they're not enough. You also need to look at: Can a girl make decisions for herself? Or is she forced into an early marriage? If she's forced into an early marriage, she's going to be pulled out of school and have a child right away—that's the expectation. So can you keep her out of that situation? If she's in school, she will be far more likely to plow the money she gets back into her family.

RM: Do you face any opposition in the United States from groups who are anti-contraception, anti-choice?

MG: Not that much, surprisingly. We really drove right down the center in reminding people that we had a coalition around contraceptives back in the '70s. But the world was going at it in the wrong way, in a top-down approach, as population control, as opposed to saying, 'Put it in the woman's hands and let her make an educated decision.' So when we reminded people that there was this consensus and that 99 percent of American women use contraceptives, it's pretty hard to be against them.

RM: Is there anything else you'd like to emphasize around women and girls?

MG: One thing I did this year that I've never done before is my oldest daughter—she was 17 at the time—we actually lived with a family for a few days, a Maasai family in Tanzania. It was incredibly instructive on lots of issues, but particularly on women and girls. The neat thing about this couple—Ana and Sinari were their names—was they had a loving relationship. She had the choice to marry him, and she chose to marry him. When she decided to do it, she had to move to his area of Tanzania. She grew up in a very lush part of Tanzania; where he lived was very, very dry. Water was scarce. So they were eking out a living on his farm—until their first son was born. She was walking 21 kilometers to get water, and here she has this infant and she can't do it anymore, she can't make it work. And so they tell this poignant story that he came home one day, and she was waiting for him with her two suitcases and her baby. And he said, 'What are you doing?' And she said, 'I'm going to move back home. I can't do it anymore, and we have this child now.' He asked, 'Well, what would it take for you to stay?' And she said, 'Well, you would have to carry the water.' The Maasai men, the last thing you do is carry the water, but he started carrying water. And the other men were making fun of him, lots of them. But eventually some would walk alongside of him for a kilometer and ask, 'Why are you doing this? You must be smitten!' And he said, 'My son is healthier because my wife can nurse him while I carry the water. And your son and your daughters would be healthier if you carried the water, too.' So eventually some of the men started walking with him, and they realized how unsafe this was, what they were asking these women to do all these years. Eventually they figured out they could do it on bicycles; and they figured out that they could build a waterpan closer to the village. And over time they've built four waterpans. Huge waterpans. So now the women are going less than a mile and a half to get water. And the men will sometimes go too. So it's that walking in a woman's shoes.

RM: That's incredible. What did your daughter think of the trip?

MG: The thing she was most touched by, the little kids would play soccer with her in the dust all day, but there was this one girl who was 15 who was too shy to really talk to us. But when my daughter came out the first night with her headlamp—it was pitch-black, there was one light in the whole compound of huts and houses—this girl went straight out, got the translator, and said, 'When you leave, can I have your headlamp so I can study at night, because I want to stay in school?' That blew both of us away. You see the power of education and how hungry the girls are, how much they want it.

RM: Talk about the power of a metaphor.

MG: A light for the world. Tell me about it.

HAIL TO THE CHIEFS

ELLE Agenda Adviser and Global Health Corps CEO Barbara Bush has learned that sometimes the first step to getting men involved in improving women's lives is hitting them where it hurts—their wallets

"Many Global Health Corps fellows work in Malawi, one of the first African countries that made improving maternal and neonatal health a national imperative—in 2008, Malawi had one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. An interesting and particularly effective solution was to shift the responsibility for maternal health from mothers onto the tribal chiefs. If a woman died in childbirth or her child wasn't born healthy, then the chiefs and their district were taxed. The economic incentive led to increased awareness around the importance of neonatal care and created a sense of shared responsibility—everyone had a role to play in ensuring that women gave birth safely in their district."

STYLE The Agenda

Tell us what's on your agenda at #ELLEAgenda, or for more from ELLE Agenda Adviser Melinda Gates and the rest of our board, visit ELLE.com/theagenda.

One of the foundation's biggest successes, Gates says, is the estimated 6 million children's lives saved through the global immunization program it spearheaded.

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